


Chronos Takes A Walk

by landrews



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Dream Crashing, Existential Angst, Fate & Destiny, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 01:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landrews/pseuds/landrews
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chronos wants to meet the man who's time traveled more than most. He has something to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chronos Takes A Walk

**Author's Note:**

> Coda: Set immediately after 6:18, 'Frontierland'
> 
> Disclaimer: Thanks to Kripke, CW, et all, just playing :-)
> 
> A/N: Written for Last Author Standing, prompt was: 'Time will tell'

 

Dean finds himself standing in the dark in a wasteland, under a thin sliver of moon. Brighter than he's ever seen it before, the Milky Way arches clear and white above him like a wide road into space. There's deep sand under his boots and the shadows of joshua trees outlining a low ridge to his left. He turns, taking in his surroundings. The desert opens into everywhere and nowhere all around him, a sparse scattering of low shrub atop rippled earth. A little breeze fingers his hair, cold enough he's glad he's got his jacket on, but light enough that he can hear the deep, endless silence. He's been in the desert at night before, and this isn't quite right. There's no skittering of lizards. No owls. He stands still a long time, listening. He's either somewhere way remote or way deep in his own head. 

A low chuckle breaks the quiet behind him and he spins, drawing the gun from his back as he drops his center of balance, crouching low. No one's there. He glances left, and is moving his eyes right when there's suddenly some great hulk of a man in front of him, massive, luminous, white wings half-spread. 

“Why do I bother sleeping,” Dean mutters. 

The man folds his wings, and tilts his head in acknowledgement, a small, bemused smile on his craggy face. Bathed in his own glow, his lips are pink and plump, rising through the long silver beard that trails onto his chest. He's wearing a... you couldn't even call it a robe, really, it's a sheet. And Dean thinks maybe that's all the man has on. He's not holding a staff or a weapon, or anything useful, just an old gold hourglass, the size of Sam's head, the sand nearly gone. His gnarled hands look like oak. Might be strong as oak, too, considering the thickness of his wrists and one exposed forearm. Dean frowns. Wing Man's got sandals on his big, calloused feet. 

“Why me, with the half-naked Angel wanna-bes?” Dean asks out loud, thinking of Cupid, and wondering, since this being actually has visible wings, if he's any kind of Angel at all. 

“I wanted to see the great Dean Winchester, the most traveled human in millennia.” 

“Um, pretty sure lots of people have traveled way more that I have, buddy.” 

“Through time, Dean, through time.” 

“Who are you?” 

“Chronos.” At Dean's raised brows, he adds, “Father Time.” 

“I thought the Grim Reaper, y'know, Death? Was Father Time?”

Chronos bursts into laughter. “No, Death reaps, but on my schedule.”

“I thought the Fates...”

“On my schedule.”

“The apopcalypse?”

“Has the apocalypse happened yet?”

“No, we stopped it.”

Chronos grins.

“Really. So, Rapheal could still pull it off.”

It looks really weird when Chronos shrugs, and his wings shrug on a half-second time delay.

A terrible question half-forms in Dean's thoughts and springs into life on his tongue before he can stop it. “Has Death reaped God?”

“Several times over.”

Dean doesn't know what that means. And why does he care? God's not helping them with Eve, anyway. “Why are you here?”

“I was curious.”

“About?”

“Walk with me,” Chronos says, and then they are drenched in sunlight.

Dean blinks furiously. They are on the Mall, in DC. He's only been here once, but they had stayed six days. Dad had dropped them at the Zoo the first day, and then here, on the Mall. They'd explored the Air and Space and Natural History Museums on their own. Two days had been spent helping Dad research in the National Archives and the Library of Congress, and then Dad had shown up bloody at dawn and after Dean stitched him up, took them to see the Wall before they hit the road again. 

It's eerie. The sky is a brilliant blue. There are trashcans half-filled and parked cars, and lights spilling out of the buildings all around them, but no people, no movement, no sounds except frogsong and cicadas. Dean tucks his gun away and they walk along on the concrete beside the reflecting pool, Chrono's wings rustling, until Lincoln looms large above them.

Peering up at the noble facade, Chronos says, “He only traveled once. It was enough.”

Dean can't decide if he should take offense at the remark. If it's meant to chasten him, Chronos can go fuck himself. Everything he thinks to say uses language that might land him back in heaven with a glance, and Dean's not willing to live through that hell again until he sends Eve to hers.

They walk on. 

At the Wall, Chronos strides nearly to the halfway point of the east panels, where the earth is rising to take the granite back, and then bends to finger a name, which is followed by a cross. A plus mark, Dean corrects himself. A plus marks the names of the missing, a diamond those killed in action. Dean crouches alongside him. “Sergeant Anthony M. Starnes,” Chronos says. “Traveled once. Never came home.”

Dean stands. “What do you want from me?”

“Only to tell you the fate of others in your shoes.”

“What fate is that? I already know how I die.”

“You think you die bloody.”

Dean freezes. He doesn't want to know, not really.

“You don't.” 

He wakes up shaking, Sam staring over at him from his bed.

“You okay?”

Dean flails up out of the sheet winding around his legs, swipes a hand over his face. His skin's chilled and damp. Clammy. “Yeah. Just a bad dream.”

***

Before dawn, they give up and get up. There's sand in his bed. Dean brushes at it, frowning. 'you think you die bloody. you don't'. He can't understand the chasm his chest becomes at those words in his inner ear, the hollowness he feels, as if his life's purpose has been stripped from him.

Dean fists his hands in the sheets and rips them off the mattress. 'I guess we'll find out,' he thinks.

 


End file.
